You could reasonably ask whether we might be seeing the beginning of a military build-up ready for a re-run of China's 1979 Strafexpedition against Vietnam, which happened in the wake of Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia aimed at toppling the genocidal PRC-backed Khmer Rouge regime, and the enactment of oppressive measures against ethnic Han Chinese in Vietnam. Indeed, the place where the military build-up is reported as occuring (Pingxiang) is exactly the same as where the 1979 invasion was launched from.

All the same, I doubt that conflict will occur. China has little to gain by launching such an invasion. The Sino-Vietnamese land border dispute was settled in 2000. Cambodia (now again a Chinese ally) is not an issue and there is no need to distract the Vietnamese military as there was in 1979. China has nothing to gain through fighting in the South China Seas since they can take whatever they like whenever they like there. Finally the 1979 experience was hardly a positive one for China's military, weakened as it was by the Cultural Revolution that had finished three years previously.

Instead this build-up is more likely to be an attempt at sabre-rattling in order to placate the understandable outrage of the Chinese public at what has happened, particularly the nationalists whom the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) counts apon as their main base of support. Indeed, it is hard not to see both sides of this dispute as being the result of what may happen when communist governments, facing the bankruptcy of their ideology, seize on nationalism as a justification for their continued rule. It is easy to see how the violent, government-orchestrated 2005 and 2012 anti-Japanese demonstrations in China could have turned into something resembling last week's anti-Chinese pogrom had the government lost control of them.